Knock Off

So bad it's good to the extreme. My friend played this at a "bad movie night" and we almost had to turn it off it was so good.

Not good by traditional measures, fine, but it has JCVD and Rob Schneider in a rickshaw race where Schneider whips JCVD with an eel to make him go faster, followed by a van crashing into a convenience store and someone using soup as a weapon, and if that isn't worth seeing once what is?

The Rob Schneider Project - day 8. A rather amusing serving for our science-team today. Knock-off may be terrible, but it's the hilariously entertaining kind of terrible. More movies need a foot-entering-shoe POV shot. After leaving the lab in good spirits, I suddenly felt a shiver and had the feeling of being watched. Turning around, I glimpsed a Schneider-like shape before it suddenly vanished. Is the work getting to me? I can't quit now. The Project must go on. Schneider-annoyance factor: 5

Schneider quest: Film 8. Jean-Claude Van Dumb stars in this confusing edited shitty action movie with Rob Schneider as his side kick. Schneider is annoying and dumb, making stupid remarks and is from the CIA. Can that be even more unrealistic?

It's like a mid-career Jackie Chan movie only with Van Damme instead. Still just as good as, say, Rumble in the Bronx or Who Am I?, though JCVD isn't quite the slapstick comedy actor Jackie is.

This film tried so hard to make me like it. It had some quirkiness, it had some jokes, it had a few hot ladies, it had JVCD hamming it up, it had action. What a shame it fucks it all up with the confusing editing of the fight scenes which is done so harshly, with such careless disregard for continuity that they quickly descend into what can only be described as a swirling, dazzling movement of colour and sound like a film made for cats.

Not bad at all, certainly one of Van Damme's best, thanks to the wild imaginative direction of Tsui Hark and despite the presence of Rob Schneider.

Remove the scenes with Rob Schneider, and you have a great 20 minute action clip.

Man, Jean Claude Van Damme really sucks, and Tsui Hark should be ashamed.

Viewed May 3, 2021. Tsui Hark did not water his style down at all for this, a movie where the camera assumes the point of view of Jean-Claude Van Damme's foot as it slides into a fake Puma sneaker. And as a movie about post-handover anxiety and anger, the plot's series of fakes, phonies, and false identities are matched perfectly by Tsui's relentless, shape-shifting, disorienting visual style; a city with its seams undone, an effect Tsui achieves so viscerally that it's almost upsetting.

You know what doesn't make a Van Damme movie more tolerable? Rob Schneider.

Marcus Ray(Van Damme), fashion designer who specializes in "knock-offs," cheaply produced jeans and sneakers. With his new partner Tommy is really an undercover CIA agent investigating the smuggling of mini-bombs in Marcus' products. An unwitting pawn in a scheme concocted by the KGB and Tommy's CIA superior Johanson (Paul Sorvino), Marcus must clear his name and save his company. His quest to do so becomes even more complicated when local authorities link him to a murder and a vice-president.

Poorly made film that practically ended JCVD's career as a movie star. Hark has made some inventive, if overly gimmicky, action films, but this is a cheap looking effort that plays like a 3rd generation zerox of his Hong Kong films, which lends its title an irony that wasn't possibly intended. Even Double Team had a manic gonzo edge that's sorely lacking from this borefest, which plods along in a rather flat footed fashion.The plot is convoluted nonsense and the fight scenes are shoddily edited.

Harmonious union of Hong Kong action and Van Damme action. There is a lot happening, especially in the beginning when Tsui Hark just goes ALL OUT on attempts at "creative" editing. This entire movie contains so much ‘90s spirit it unavoidably drives me into melancholy.

With Hong Kong veteran Tsui Hark at the helm this JCVD flick is very stylized filmed. This does give the action scenes an extra edge. But the whole movie is so relentlessly stylized it gets tiresome. Even more the frenetic editing mess up most of the action choreography. Above that the nonsensical plot is extremely convoluted and all characters annoying (with Paul Schneider obviously leading the pack, but van Damme not far behind)

The flaws with this Van Damme film are obvious, but Tsui Hark decision to turn the generic material into an excessively hyperactive action film makes it stand up far better than most. Whether it is very unconventional camera shots (first person of a foot into a shoe?) to the fluid yet haphazard fight scenes, it cannot be taken seriously and is better for it, sharing the same goofy mood that Van Damme himself has wandering through the scenes that is infectious.

Fun visuals and camera work; would have been better if excised completely of rob schneider, but so would every film.

Not really as bad as people say it is. At least it's better than some of Van Damme's other movies. The action choreography in this is at least visually interesting at times.

Tsui Hark is always so very close to shooting himself in the foot with his visuals. This is a film where not just that failed, but everything backfired.

Well, I laughed...

While it's all well & good to see a Hong Kong film hit mainstream screens in the US of A fully loaded with explosions & stunts & Jean-Claude & Tsui, I still would like a little more coherence. Maybe just i am left behind, but i cant usually tell what is going on in the fight scenes.

Not so much a movie as a bunch of stuff happening on-screen with no real rhyme or reason. If you're going to cast JCVD in a movie then make sure to include a sizable chunk of him kicking assorted bad-guy ass; this doesn't. Instead we get a convoluted mess of double-crossing; which would be fine except that all the double-crossing characters barely get any screen time before their treachery is revealed, so who cares? Combined with the headache-inducing camera-work and this is just an utter mess.

I thought it was kinda fun actually.

Worth a watch

I love this movie. Don't ask me.

It's like Hark Tsui made an American film as a prank on us. A very telling clue to this prank theory is that he put Rob Schneider in it. Then he ran snickering back to China and never made a U.S. movie again. That sneaky bastard.

I went into it expecting some van damage and all I got was schneidered in the arse. Not worth it

Horrifying look at a universe in which the CIA hires Rob Schneider.